conceptualizing an emancipatory alternative: istván ... · conceptualizing an emancipatory...

Conceptualizing an EmancipatoryAlternative: István Mészáros'sBeyond Capital

Peter Hudis

It is a rare occasion to encounter a work which so directlyconfronts the central problem of our time. The globalization of capitaland comrnodification of every conceivable area of everyday life, alongwith the worldwide collapse of an array of revolutionary movements,have provided a near-unshakable foundation for the claim that one oranother form of capitalism defines our future. Whether expressed asthe "end of history," the "death of the subject," or the "permanence ofalienation," the present historic moment is defined by a profoundcrisis in the ability to envision the transcendence of capitalist socialrelations. The unsettling character of this reality has spurred a numberof recent efforts to reexamine the contemporary importance of Marx'swork. In light of the all-pervasiveness and power of the claim that wehave no choice but to accept the limits of the given, it has becomeincreasingly evident that the projection of an emancipatory alternativeto "actually existing capitalism" is the most important task facingradical theory today.

And yet while there is growing awareness of the need to projectanew a comprehensive liberatory alternative, few seem willing toplunge into the actual endeavor. It is one thing to single out somespecific aspects of Marx's thought which speak to today (as Derridadoes in Specters of Marx), and quite another to rethink his oeuvreas a whole in light of our present predicament. It is one thing toengage in various critiques of existing institutions and thinkers(important as that may be), and quite another to reconceptualize thevery meaning of a socialist perspective. Yet it is precisely here thatMészâros's work takes on great importance. Few others have asdirectly and honestly confronted the crisis in envisioning analternative to existing society. He painstakingly shows through this

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38 Socialism and Democracy

1,000-page study that present-day capitalism is submerged in a"depressed continuum" characterized by "an endemic, permanent,structural crisis" (Mészâros 1995: 597). Yet he no less painstakinglyshows that the failure of all efforts at socialist revolution to movefrom the mere elimination of capitalists to the abolition of capitalitself has placed the very idea of socialism in profound crisis. Theabolition of the personifications of capital, Mészâros again andagain insists, does not necessarily lead to the abolition of capital as auniversalizing social form of metabolic control. The persistence ofthe capital-form as the defining medium of social interaction inSoviet-type societies is proof, he argues, of the insufficiency offocusing on the elimination of the agents of capital as the ne plusultra of socialist theory and practice. Moreover, the failure of suchsocieties to avoid the defects characteristic of "classic" capitalismhas turned masses of working people away from the very idea ofsocialism itself. Mészâros insists that unless we work out what hecalls a "theory of transition" that pinpoints the forms by which therevolutionary seizure of power can lead to the abolition of capital,we will be unable to extricate ourselves from the profound impassewhich has been reached in the socialist movement.

He writes, "creating the necessary mediations towards [theabolition of capital] cannot be left to some far-away future...for ifthe mediatory steps are not pursued right from the outset, as anorganic part of the transformatory strategy, they will never betaken" (1995: 729). He moreover argues,

It is not too difficult to point to crisis symptoms that foreshadowthe breakdown of the established socioeconomic and politicalorder. However, in and of itself the profound structural crisis ofthe capital system is very far from being enough to inspireconfidence in a successful outcome. The pieces must be picked upand put together in due course in a positive way. And not eventhe gravest crisis or the most severe breakdowns are of much helpby themselves in that respect. It is always incomparably easier tosay 'no' than to draw even the bare outlines of a positivealternative to the negated object. Only on the basis of a coherentstrategic view of the overall social complex can even a partialnegation of the existent be considered plausible or legitimate(xvii-xviii).Mészâros is under no illusions about the difficulty of outlining

such a "theory of transition." It entails not only going against thegrain of established thought, but also challenging the logic of capitalitself, since the very nature of capital as a universalizing social form


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is to convey the impression that the transitory, historic stage ofcapitalism is natural and immutable. At the same time, Mészâros isfully conscious of the pitfall of falling into utopianism by outliningblueprints of a future society. Though hatching Utopian schemesmay seem immediately satisfying, they generally fail to lift thoughtbeyond the very contours of the social form they seek to critique.The task of confronting the question of "what happens after therevolution" involves a far more laborious and formidable task, onecentered on explicating the social formations and tendenciesinherent in modern society which can point us beyond the contoursof the present capital-system.

Mészâros's book consists not of a delineation of the specificcontent of such a "theory of transition" as much as a critique of theconceptual barriers standing in the way of its development. Thebulk of it consists of a series of extended critiques of those whoeither pose the capital-form as an immutable law of human historyor fail to conceptualize a pathway to its transcendence. Of theformer, Mészâros develops a devastating critique of figures such asvon Hayek and Weber, while of the latter he sharply attacks thelimitations of Social Democracy and Stalinism. He takes special aimat the tendency of Marxists, going as far back as the SecondInternational, to assume that the material conditions of capitalismcan be directly utilized to bring forth a non-capital-producingsociety. Marx of course said many times that capitalism engendersthe material conditions for its dissolution. The Marxists of theSecond International took this to mean, however, that thecentralization of capital and socialization of labor under capitalismwould bring forth socialism in quasi-automatic fashion. All mat wasrequired was a Party large and strong enough to pick up the piecesonce capitalism collapsed. They therefore felt no responsibility toarticulate a vision of a socialist future, using Marx's stricturesagainst utopianism as a "pillow for intellectual sloth."

Mészâros stresses that most Marxists failed to see thatcapitalism's material conditions cannot be directly utilized to createa new society, since they are afflicted with hierarchies of class,gender, and race. Though the material conditions engender theforms necessary for a reconstruction of society, the actual creationof these forms hinges, not on historical necessity, but on theconscious articulation and implementation of human relationswhich dispense with the capitalist law of value. Thoughevolutionist confidence in the direct applicability of capitalism's



material conditions for building socialism seemed to suffer asetback with the collapse of the Second International in 1914, itobtained a new lease on life with the transformation of the RussianRevolution into a totalitarian society in the Stalin period. Theemergence of statified property as a veritable fetish in Stalin'sRussia and Mao's China convinced even those opposed to Stalinism(such as the Trotskyists) that the abolition of the market and privateproperty represented an advance upon private capitalism. Marxistsdung to the assumption mat the centralization of capital andsocialization of labor, even under a totalitarian regime, proved thathistory was moving inexorably in the direction of socialism.Burdened by this assumption, they felt little need to address thequestion, "what happens after the revolution?"

The world which underlay these assumptions came crashingdown by 1989. The 1980s proved without a shadow of a doubt thatthe centralization of capital and socialization of labor when heldwithin the integument of the capital-form did not bring humanitycloser to a socialist future, but instead dovetailed with theprerequisites of high-tech "free market" capitalism. Mészârosshows that the nature of contemporary capitalism makes it moreproblematic than ever to presume that the existing materialconditions can be directly appropriated for building anon-capital-produdng society. For the reproduction of capital todayrequires a level of destructiveness of environmental resources andhuman creativity unprecedented in human history. Given itsinherent social and natural destructiveness, it would be the heightof foolishness to presume that a post-revolutionary society can baseitself on the social productivity of capital. Utilizing the existingmaterial conditions through a mere change of property forms,redistribution of income, or elimination of the personifications ofcapital can in no way lead to improved conditions of life. The veryinternal dynamic and social hierarchies which constitute thedomination of labor by capital must begin to be broken down in theimmediate aftermath of a revolutionary seizure of power;otherwise, not even the most minimal progress can be recorded. AsMészâros argues,

Unless some viable strategies of transition succeed in breaking thevicious circle of the by now catastrophic social embeddedness ofcapitalist technology, the 'productivity' of capital will continue tocast its dark shadow as a constant and acute threat to survival,rather than being that accomplishment of 'the material conditionsof emancipation' which Marx often greeted with praise.f...] [I]n


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light of the 20th century historical experience and the failure of allpast attempts to overcome the dehumanizing constraints andcontradictions of capitalism, the meaning of radical negation canonly be defined as a subordinate moment of the positive project oflabor's hegemonic alternative to capital itself (432,793).The problem which confronts us today, Mészâros argues, is that

much of radical thought is ill-equipped to deal with this task. Toillustrate this he devotes considerable attention to Georg Lukâcs. Itmay seem odd to some readers for Mészâros to spend severalhundred pages on Lukâcs, but this is hardly a subjective decisionrelated to Mészâros's long association with him (he was one ofLukâcs's most highly-regarded students, corresponded with himlong after he went into exile after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,and wrote several perceptive studies of Lukâcs's work). Mészârosrather focuses so much attention on Lukâcs in order to directattention to the conceptual barriers which even the greatestMarxists encountered when it came to confronting "what happensafter" the revolution.

The specific problem illuminated by Lukâcs is brought intofocus by his late work, The Ontology of Social Existence, writtenafter his break from Stalinism and his return to the philosophicthemes which characterized his History and Class Consciousness(1923). Though his massive Ontology is brilliant in many respects, itcontains a profoundly self-limiting concept in arguing that sociallynecessary labor time continues to operate under "socialism."Lukâcs defended his position through a rather selective reading of afamous passage of chapter 1 of Capital in which Marx, in speakingof a future non-capitalist society, says "Let us assume, but only forthe sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that theshare of each individual producer in the means of subsistence isdetermined by his labor time" (Marx 1975:172). Lukâcs takes this tomean that Marx views socially necessary labor time as operative insocialism as well as in capitalism, despite Marx's own disclaimerthat he was using the notion of labor time "only for the sake of aparallel." This is far from an incidental point, because it meant thatLukâcs viewed the cardinal principle of capitalism—the reductionof concrete human laboring activity into abstract labor through themedium of socially necessary labor time—as also operative in the"new society." The ramifications of this were most tragically shownin one of Lukâcs's last works, The Process of Democratization(1968). Instead of projecting the need to abolish a social system inwhich labor remains dominated by capital, he limited himself to



calls for "democratization" within the framework of the structuresof "actually existing socialism." He wrote,

The heroic days of the French and Russian revolutions are over,and rather than greatness we have the average. The contemporaryworld makes for the small, and we must be satisfied to be palereflections of more noble prototypes from the past... [W]e mustlimit ourselves (Lukâcs 1988:152).Such a prosaic vision could hardly speak to today's need for a

liberating vision of the future opposed to both "free market"capitalism and what Mészâros considers "non-capitalist capital-producing societies" of the "Soviet" type.

The question that dearly concerns Mészâros is: how can such aprofound thinker as Lukâcs end up posing the capitalist law ofvalue as a veritable immutable condition of human existence? Whatlimitation resides within his thought which prevented him fromprojecting a truly liberatory vision of a post-revolutionary sodety?As a most perceptive and sensitive critic of his former mentor,Mészâros knows that Lukâcs's accommodation with such existingstructures can only be explained by the innermost principles of histhought. As Mészâros sees it, the root of the problem lies inLukâcs's original theory of dass consdousness, projected in hismagisterial History and Class Consciousness.

As against the Second International's emphasis on materialconditions, Lukâcs posed class consciousness as the deciding factorin bridging the gap between the realities of the present and thesodal forms of the future. As he wrote in History and ClassConsciousness, "It is an ideological crisis which must be solvedbefore a practical solution to the world's economic crisis can befound" (Lukâcs 1971: 79). It may be hard for contemporary radicals,raised on theorists stressing cultural theory and non-deterministfactors, to realize just how revolutionary it sounded in 1923 to treatdass consdousness as subjective and culturally bound rather thandetermined by objective economic existence. Yet Lukâcs was a trueoriginal in doing so, and in fact placed so much emphasis on thequestion of dass consdousness that he equated proletarianconsdousness to the Hegelian identity of subject and object.

Mészâros correctly notes that this involved Lukâcs in a thornycontradiction. For if the proletariat equals the Hegelian identity ofsubject and object, how does one explain the gap between theworkers's present-day consdousness and the idea of a new sodety?To answer this, Lukâcs developed his famous theory of reification.


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This centered on the notion that capitalism reproduces itself notonly through the transformation of labor power into a commodity,but also through the commodification of thought. By applying thisnotion of reification of thought to the proletariat, Lukâcs sought toexplain the gap between present-day proletarian consciousness andthe idea of a new society, while at the same time posing thefull-fledged development of proletarian class consciousness asrepresenting the unity of subject and object. Yet this only succeededin shifting the contradiction onto a different level. On the one hand,Lukâcs posed the path to socialism as flowing from the spontaneousgeneration of workers' class consciousness; yet at the same time, hisnotion of the reification of tiiought implied that workers cannotreach socialist consciousness through their own endeavor. After all,if even our thought is reified how are we to free ourselves? Lukâcshad a ready answer—the Party will free you, by serving as the"knowing" of the proletariat. As Mészâros cogently observes,

Paradoxically, by the idealization of the working class as theactual possessor of the 'standpoint of totality,' Lukacs creates forhimself a situation from which there can be no way out except byleaping from imperative to imperative.... [I]n order to be able tobridge the gap between the ideal construct and the ratherdisconcerting real situation, Lukâcs is led to an imperatival [sic]substitution—the Party (326).*As Mészâros sees it, this deification of the Party as an outside

force to resolve contradiction reflected Lukâcs's failure to envisionthe actual "material mediations" needed to surmount thehierarchies of class society. By laboring "under the illusion thattheoretical illumination—the work of consciousness uponconsciousness—can produce the required changes in social reality"(Mészâros 1995: 360), Lukâcs failed to spell out how the dominationof labor by capital can actually be overcome. This took on criticalimportance as the problems facing the Russian Revolutionintensified. On the one hand, the pressing practical problems facingthe young workers' state made it imperative to work out specificforms of mediation which could move the revolution from theabolition of capitalists toward the abolition of capital as auniversalizing form of social control. On the other hand, Lukâcs'semphasis on consciousness as a veritable ethic of revolution

* Italics in all quotes are in the original.



supplied no concrete answers for what to do within the limitationsof the given situation. Confronted with an inability to translate histheoretic imperatives into concrete mediatory strategies, Lukâcsincreasingly accommodated himself to the existing forms of socialcontrol being implemented by the post-Lenin regime. In Mészâros'sreading, Lukâcs's capitulation to Stalinism was no matter ofpersonal weakness or lack of bravery. It was the result of relying onsubjective factors of consciousness to the exclusion of developingconcrete mediatory strategies wedded to the exigencies of the givensituation. The more Lukâcs stressed the ethical power ofconsciousness, the more he ultimately found himself unable toanswer the pressing questions posed by post-revolutionary society.As a result, he was increasingly drawn toward accepting the waythose questions were posed by the existing political forces. This hadnot just political, but theoretic ramifications, as seen in his view thatsocially necessary labor time continues to operate under"socialism"—a position which he never rejected.

Mészâros's critique of Lukâcs goes a long way towardanswering how such a brilliant Marxist could end upaccommodating himself to the permanence of the capitalist law ofvalue. And yet Mészâros's aim is not simply to take issue withLukâcs. His real aim is to identify Hegel as the one responsible forthe failure to project a viable alternative to capital. As he sees it,Lukâcs's reconciliation with the forms of existing society flows fromhis attachment to the Hegelian dialectic, insofar as Hegel deifiescapital as the ultimate form of human interaction. For this reason,he argues, Hegelian Marxism cannot aid the effort to project analternative to the power of capital.

Though most reviewers of Beyond Capital have tended tooverlook Mészâros's critique of Hegel, it actually serves as theconceptual core of the book. It also represents an important point ofdeparture for Mészâros himself, since he was once closelyassociated with Hegelian Marxism. In the early 1980s, for instance,Mészâros wrote an important essay entitled "Marx, 'Philosopher'"in which he stated,

The speculative verbal supersession of philosophy by "Theory,""Theoretical Practice"...and the like, can only lead to aconservative rejection of the unity of theory and practice and tothe sceptical dismissal of Marx's values as unrealizable dreams.(Mészâros 1982:109).With Beyond Capital, however, Mészâros has moved much

further away from Hegelian dialectics and philosophy as a whole,


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promoting in its stead the need for a "theory of transition" or, inother words, critical social theory rooted in a "a strategic overviewof the social complex."

Mészâros's move in this direction dearly flows from hisconcern with the ideological hegemony of the notion that "there isno alternative" to existing capitalism. Francis Fukuyama hasdeveloped the well-known (and much-refuted) notion that Hegel'sphilosophy centers on the notion of the "end of history," which heclaims has now been reached with the "triumph" of liberaldemocracy. Though there is but one passing reference to Fukuyamain the book, it is hard to avoid the impression that Mészâros is outto refute Fukuyama while sharing the central thrust of his argumentvis-à-vis Hegel. Whereas Fukuyama wants to defend liberaldemocracy in the name of Hegel, Mészâros wants to debunk it byrejecting Hegel.

Mészâros bases his contention that Hegel's dialectic is the mereexpression of the logic of capital on a reading which focuses onHegel's political writings. There are virtually no references to thePhenomenology of Mind or the Science of Logic, and the fewreferences to the Philosophy of Spirit (the third part of theEncyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) are all to its early sectionson political and social issues. He mainly focuses on Hegel'sPhilosophy of Right, and on one passage in particular—paragraph199, where Hegel says society "now presents itself to each as theuniversal permanent capital." Actually, in the German originalHegel speaks of "allgemein bleibendes Vermo'gen," which is moreproperly translated as "universal permanent wealth" (Hegel 1976:130), which Mészâros himself acknowledges in a lengthy footnote.It may appear that Mészâros's argument that Hegel projects thepermanence of capital rests on a rather slender thread. However,there is little doubt from his other writings that Hegel neverconsciously envisioned the transcendence of capitalist relations ofproduction. What is in doubt is whether Hegel's stated views onpolitical issues matter more than what Raya Dunayevskaya called"the self-drive of the dialectic [which] drove through the historicbarriers Hegel could not transcend" (Dunayevskaya 1989a: 45). Inother words, despite Hegel's political reconciliation with existingreality, does his philosophy, especially his concept of absolutenegativity, point toward a transcendence of the logic of capitalwhich is important to recapture for today?



Mészâros himself does not think so. As he sees it, Hegel'sall-important concept of Absolute Spirit betrays an uncannyresemblance to the logic of capital. Hegel's Absolute Spirit, asMészâros sees it, is a self-moving substance which absorbs allcontingency into itself. It is subject—a self-acting, self-referential,self-grounded entity. Just as Hegel's Absolute affirms differencewhile dissolving it into the self-movement of the cognitive subject,so, as many have noted, labor in capitalism affirms naturalcontingency while dissolving it into the self-movement of abstractlabor. Hegel's Absolute Spirit, in this reading, is nothing less thanthe intellectual equivalent of the logic of capital.

It should nevertheless be noted that while Marx certainly had asharp critique of Hegel's concept of Absolute Spirit, and evenreferred to Hegel's Logic as "the money of the spirit," he did nothave as dismissive an attitude toward Hegel's concept oftranscendence through absolute negativity as Mészâros presumes.Marx vigorously critiqued Hegel for dehumanizing the dialectic intreating it as various stages of thought instead of as live corporalhumanity. This does not mean, however, that Marx consideredHegel's concept of absolute negativity a mere idealist delusion, asdid Feuerbach. In his 1844 "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,"Marx praised Hegel's notion that all forward movement proceedsthrough absolute negativity and appropriated it for his own visionof the transcendence of the value-form. The "Communist" abolitionof private property, he noted, is merely a first negation; to achievethe actual abolition of capitalism requires "the negation of thenegation," which he defined as "a thoroughgoing Naturalism orHumanism, which distinguishes itself from both idealism andmaterialism and is the truth uniting them both" (Marx 1963: 213).By transcending Hegel's dehumanization of the idea in placing livesubjects of revolt as bearers of the dialectic, Marx unchained itsrevolutionary implications which Hegel himself could not envision.This critical appropriation of Hegel's dialectic became the basis forMarx's 40-year development of a philosophy of "revolution inpermanence." It proved that far from simply expressing the logic ofcapital, Hegel's dialectic gives expression to a dialectic of liberation.

Mészâros, on the other hand, rejects Hegel's treatment of thetranscendence of alienation on the grounds that it fails to point usbeyond the capital-form. The irony here is that for all of Mészâros'scritique of Lukâcs, his reading of Hegel on this score is rootedfirmly in Lukâcs's position (especially as developed in The Young


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Hegel) that Hegel's dialectic was of service to Marx only insofar asit expresses a dialectic of externalization (or alienation). In TheYoung Hegel, Lukâcs argued that Hegel's tracing out of the journeyof self-consciousness in much of the Phenomenology of Mind wasof great service to Marx insofar as Hegel's treatment of the journeyof consciousness "externalizing" itself through various stages ofcontradiction mirrors the actual alienation of labor in class society.At the same time, Lukâcs called Hegel's treatment of thetranscendence of externalization in the final chapter of thePhenomenology ("Absolute Knowledge") nothing but an idealistmystification, since Lukâcs held that transcendence is thereachieved through the annulment of historic contingency (Lukâcs1975: 537-68). Despite Mészâros's critique of Lukâcs, his rejection ofHegel's concept of transcendence is completely in the spirit ofLukâcs's overall approach to dialectics.

Lukâcs never seriously addressed how his total rejection ofHegel's concept of transcendence squared with Marx's 1844"Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic," in which Marx praised the"estranged insight" contained within Hegel's notion of transcen-dence—namely, that humanity's "true essence" is revealed andmade real through "the negation of the negation." Nor doesMészâros tackle this issue, though his work (as we shall soon see)contains much discussion of Marx.

This involves more than splitting textual hairs. At each crisispoint in the history of Marxism, socialists have felt the need toreturn to Hegel to find their way out of seemingly insoluble crisesconfronting the revolutionary movement. It was true of Lenin in1914, when in response to the outbreak of World War I and thecollapse of the Second International he dove deeply into a study ofHegel's Science of Logic. It was true of French Marxists as well asthe FrankfurtSchool in the 1930s and 1940s, who turned to Hegelanew as fascism engulfed Europe. And it was true in the early 1950sin the U.S., when thinkers such as C.L.R. James and Dunayevskayaturned to a study of Hegel's Logic and Philosophy of Spirit as partof a search for new liberatory concepts to battle die tyranny of thesingle party state (Dunayevskaya 1989b: 23-52). If Mészâros'sreading of Hegel is correct, the only benefit of returning to Hegeltoday would be to delineate the logic of capital; there would be nopoint to turning to Hegel to help fill the void in the projection of anemancipatory alternative. If Mészâros is wrong, however, he is



pointing the reader away from the ground needed to work out theproblematic which so concerns him.

Mészâros's turn away from Hegel and from philosophy as awhole colors his treatment of many issues in Beyond Capital,including his extended discussion of Marx. Mészâros takes usthrough an array of different writings of Marx, from The GermanIdeology to the Grundrisse to the various volumes of Capital, as hetries to recapture for today Marx's critique of the notion of theimmutability of- the capital-form. Though it is not possible toexplore all of Mészâros's treatment of Marx here, it is important tosingle out his reading of Marx's writings in the period in which hewrote The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875).

It is not hard to see why Mészâros is drawn to this document,as it is one of the few places where Marx directly addressed thequestion of what happens after the revolutionary seizure of power.Mészâros sees the Critique as the fullest expression of Marx'sinsistence on envisioning forms of mediation which can propelrevolution beyond the mere political overthrow of the bourgeoisie.He writes,

[Marx] insisted that even the most radical negation remains independency on the object of its negation.... [Tjhis is why thesocialist revolution could not be conceived as a single act, nomatter how radical in intent. It had to be described...as anongoing, consistently self-critical social revolution, i.e., as a•permanent revolution (792).Mészâros is also one of the very few to single out how Marx's

Critique of the Gotha Program illuminates a concept ofrevolutionary organization. Marx's refusal to sanction the unity ofhis followers with those of Lassalle, Mészâros argues, shows thatremaining faithful to socialist principles counted for far more toMarx than organizational unity—a point largely overlooked by hisfollowers. To Mészâros, this shows that Marx's concept oforganization was an integral part of his concept of revolutionarytransformation. He writes,

If the socialist revolution is seen primarily as political in character,rather than as a multidimensional, and therefore necessarily'permanent' social revolution, as Marx defined it, in that case theproduction and préservation of unity overrides everything inimportance. If, however, it is recognized that the acquisition ofpower is only the starting point for unearthing the real difficultiesand contradictions of that transformation 'from top to


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bottom'...then the need for genuinely pluralist strategies assertsitself (696).In light of Mészâros's sensitive reading of Marx's Critique, it is

all the more disappointing that he is largely dismissive of much ofMarx's work from the period in which the Critique was written.The 1870s, Mészâros notes, marked the inception of consumer-basedeconomies in which a sector of the laboring classes in the West wasincreasingly beginning to identify with the established system.Though Marx responded to such reformist pressures adequatelyenough on a political level in his Critique of the Gotha Program,Mészâros feels that Marx did not take the emergence of massconsumer society seriously enough in his work on Vols. II and III ofCapital. He says that Marx acted as if the success of therevolutionary movement was assured and therefore felt under littlecompulsion to rethink the prospects of revolution in light of theglobal expansion of capitalism:

Marx was in his element at times when the manifestations of crisiswere at their most intense. By the same token, he experiencedgreat difficulties from the 1870s (which represented a period ofmajor success in capital's global expansion). Such difficultiespresented themselves not only politically, in relation to someimportant organizations of the working class, but alsotheoretically, in assessing the new turn of developments.Reflecting this, the intellectual production of his last fifteen yearsbears no comparison to the previous decade and a half, nor withihe fifteen years just before that (480).Aside from the fact that most of Vols. II and III of Capital were

written prior to the publication of Vol. I in 1867, and therefore weredeveloped a decade before the new realities which Mészâros feelsMarx was not responding to in the 1870s, it is hard to squareMészâros's view of the late Marx from what we now know from hislast writings. The "last fifteen years" of Marx's life includes theFrench edition of Capital (1872-75), his studies of North Africa,India, and Moslem society in the Notebooks on Kovalevsky, thefour lengthy drafts of his Letters to Zasulich on the Russian villagecommune, and the 400-page Ethnological Notebooks, which takesup indigenous pre-capitalist formations among American Indians,East Asians and Australian aborigines. This is not to mention anarray of other writings, such as his Preface to the 1882 Russianedition of The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx predicted thatRussia could achieve a socialist revolution ahead of the West.



None of these writings are dealt with by Mészâros, whorepeatedly plays down the significance of Marx's last decade. Thisis hardly accidental or incidental. Mészâros seems so overburdenedwith Marx's alleged failure to recognize how capitalism wasmanaging to stave off revolution in the West that he overlooks thenew point of departure worked out by Marx in his last writings. Forafter the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the capitulationof his followers to organizational unity with Lassalleans in 1875,Marx increasingly turned his attention to the "East"—not becausehe lost his power of intellectual concentration, but because he waslooking for revolutionary new beginnings from the technologicallyunderdeveloped world which could act as an impetus todevelopments in the West as well. If Marx did not spend his lastdecade analyzing the ways in which capitalism was managing tostabilize itself through the introduction of consumerism, it wasbecause his emphasis was on seeking out ever-new sources ofrevolutionary transformation. This emphasis on the dialectics ofrevolution, far from being restricted to his last writings, is the redthread running • through entire Marx's forty-year development.Marx responded to moments of setback in revolution, not byemphasizing the tendencies that foster "social stability," but ratherby elucidating new nodal points of potential revolutionarytransformation. As a number of analysts of Marx's last decade havepointed out, Marx constantly kept his eye on the possibility ofnewly emerging forces of revolution—whether they be workers orpeasants, women or indigenous peoples. As against the notion thatMarx moved from a philosophic critique in the 1840s to the"critique of political economy" with Capital, the writings of Marx'slast decade help indicate that all of Marx's work represents thedevelopment of a philosophy of "revolution in permanence."

Mészâros's turn away from a philosophic approach to Marx'swork in favor of an emphasis on "a strategic overview of the socialcomplex," on the other hand, tends to subsume how deeply Marxrooted his thought in the dialectics of revolution. This tendency toskip over Marx's rootedness in the dialectics of revolution may inturn explain why the dialectics of revolution as a whole does notfigure prominently in Beyond Capital. One might think that a workwhich seeks to delineate a theory of transition would provide somesort of view, however cursory, of the experiences confronted byvarious efforts at revolutionary transformation in this century. Wehave seen revolutionary movements arise in Portugal, Angola and


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Mozambique, Nicaragua, and elsewhere; it would surely be helpfulto explore in what way they have contributed or failed to contributeinsights concerning the social and organizational forms ofmediation needed to ensure that the expropriation of the capitalistsmoves toward the abolition of capital itself. Yet such discussion isstrangely missing from the book, leaving the reader feeling thatMészâros's call for a theory of transition rings louder than theactual elaboration of one.

This is not to say that Mészaros does not provide crucialinsights concerning the overall direction for. such a theory oftransition. Of special importance is his discussion of women'sliberation. Mészaros is fully aware that the value-form of mediationcannot be stripped away so long as hierarchical and sexist attitudesand practices toward women persist. Precisely because thecapital-form does not emerge from whole-cloth, but incorporateshierarchies of gender, class and race which precede capitalism, itcan only be broken down through a comprehensive revolutionaryuprooting which leaves no sector of society untouched. AsMészaros notes, "so long as the vital relationship between womenand men is not freely and spontaneously regulated by theindividuals themselves..., there can be no question of emancipatingsociety from the crippling impact of alienation" (187).

Yet while such insights make this work more than worth theeffort of exploring, one is still left with the impression thatMészaros has done a much better job arguing for the need of atheory of transition than actually supplying one. It is of coursehardly possible to expect any one thinker, even in a book of thislength, to supply a worked-out answer to the question of how toensure that the revolutionary seizure of political power ultimatelyleads to the abolition of capital itself. Mészaros is quite right thatachieving this is a formidable task which requires marshaling thefullest energies of today's socialist theorists and activists. Thequestion, however, is whether Mészâros's move away from anHegelian-centered Marxism leaves him with too narrow aphilosophic base from which to work out the question of "whathappens after the revolution" which so concerns him. As notedearlier, Marx's 1844 projection of a "thoroughgoing Naturalism orHumanism" which transcends both capitalism and what he called"vulgar communism" was achieved by being deeply rooted in theHegelian concept of self-movement through "the negation of thenegation." For Marx, the Hegelian notion that the transcendence of



alienation proceeds through second negativity was no metaphysicalabstraction, as it .was for Feuerbach; on the contrary, Marx held thatinsofar as the idea of second negativity is embodied in forces ofrevolution like the proletariat, it expresses "the actual movement ofhistory." Given this legacy, can we really meet the need ofprojecting a total alternative to capital today if we turn our backs onthe Hegelian Marxist legacy? Is it really possible to work out acomprehensive theory of a post-revolutionary society without thebenefit such crucial philosophic concepts as "the negation of thenegation?" And can Marx's legacy truly be recaptured for our timeif the relationship between philosophy and revolution is notreformulated and reconcretized anew?

There is no doubt that Mészâros's turn away from a philosophicMarxism in favor of an emphasis on a "theory of transition" rootedin "a strategic view of the social complex" flows from hisrecognition of the limitations of the Hegelian Marxist tradition asexemplified in the work of Georg Lukâcs. Cogent as much of hiscritique of Lukâcs is, however, it is important not to throw out theHegelian baby with the bath water. While many Hegelian Marxistsfailed in the end- to meet the historic test of projecting a concept ofliberation that points to the transcendence, not just of capitalistprivate property, but of capital itself, there remain crucialdimensions of this tradition that we would reject at our peril. I amespecially referring to the development of Marxist-Humanism inthe U.S., which emerged from a direct effort to break down themeaning of Hegel's Absolutes for the contemporary freedomstruggles. From the early 1950s through the 1980s, Dunayevskayasought to achieve continuity with Marx's unchaining of the dialecticby elucidating • the concept of "absolute negativity as newbeginning" for today's ideological and social realities. In discerningthe movements from practice of our era as embodying a quest fortotally new human relations, she called for a new movement fromtheory to make this reaching for the "negation of the negation"explicit and real.

Today it may well be hard to see how forces of revolt embodythe idea of second negativity. The failures of actual revolutions areso glaring, the collapse of revolutionary movements so obvious, andthe crisis in projecting a philosophic expression of the workingclasses' quest for universality so overwhelming, that the presence ofabsolute negativity in today's freedom struggles has been obscured.This does not mean, however, that the task of reconstituting


Peter Hudis 53

revolutionary Marxism on the basis of a philosophic projection ofabsolute negativity has come to an end. At a moment when theself-determination of the idea is not hearing itself speak, subsumedas it is under the mire of half-way houses ranging from electoralcompromises to Million Man Marches, such philosophic projectionbecomes all the more imperative. In a period of retrogression suchas our own, a comprehensive philosophy is needed to help elicit thedrive for absolute negativity which lies concealed under thesemblance of existing contingencies.

While Beyond Capital falls short of this task, Mészâros hasnevertheless provided an invaluable study in raising the need tobegin working out a comprehensive vision of an alternative futurenow. For that reason, readers today and far into the future will havemuch to learn from Beyond Capital.

REFERENCES

Dunayevskaya, Raya. 1989a. Philosophy and Revolution, fromHegel to Marx to Mao. New York: Columbia University Press.

. 1989b. The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-HumanismChicago: News and Letters.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1976. Philosophy of Right, trans, by T.M. Knox.London: Oxford University Press.

Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge:MIT Press.

. 1975. The Young Hegel. London: Merlin Press.

. 1988. The Process of Democratization. Albany: SUNYPress.

Marx, Karl. 1963. Early Writings. New York: McGraw Hill.. 1975. Capital. Vol. I. New York: Vintage.

Mészáros, István. 1995. Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory ofTransition. New York: Monthly Review Press.

_____ . 1982. "Marx 'Philosopher'," The History of Marxism,Vol. I, ed. by Eric J. Hobsbawm. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press.


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